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One of my clients just made the bold move and phone orders are now being tracked. I couldn’t talk about it because they would not even give me the details until their patent was filed.
Having an 800# is very important to online sales and legit businesses MUST have an 800# for questions or for people who are afraid to order online. However, some products tend to get more phone calls. With this client, I assume customers sometimes have tech questions like "which is the best turntable that has xyz features?" or "my speakers just blew - what brand do you think is the most reliable and the best price?" So for this company to now track and credit affiliates for phone sales I think is HUGE and shows how high integrity they are.
800# phone sales tracking is not the industry norm and affiliates lose out on a lot of phone orders. I am working on a very exciting new solution with another one of my clients which will be announced soon. I am trying to discover the most compelling wording that will get customers to mention the aff ID when they call the 800#.
This is what one (typically critical) super affiliate had to say about this:
"Linda, first, I have to say thank you. I hope this will serve as an example for others to follow. However, I also realize that this 1-800 tracking is on of the fringe benefits to affiliate marketing when it comes to giving advertisers an edge. We (affiliates) lose on this issue, until someone, like you, and your company, comes along and says, "we care". For merchants who read this: this is how you get noticed, and get preferential treament when it comes to making a decision on what we promote, and what we don't promote."
The 1st client I mentioned above is using "priority code" some others I have seen list the affiliate id as a phone extension. Do any of you work with other companies that credit affiliate phone sales? If so, what is the best method you have seen for insuring that customers will use the affiliate id when they phone in orders?
Once I get merchant #2 set up with affiliate phone sales tracking, I intend to do a large promotional campaign and get a lot of press which will force more other high integrity merchants to follow suit and start paying for phone sales.
Any and all feedback and ideas will be sincerely appreciated and will help lots of affiliates earn more money!
Thanks,
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I agree! My guess is that 99% don't track phone sales so when one does, it's news IMHO. What we are trying to do for my next merchant is a variable header that will change when an affiliate link is clicked.
Creating a solution that will work for thousands of affiliates a bigger issue than most realize. For merchants - it's not just the phone commission that is an issue. There are programming and testing costs, retraining and monitoring of phone sales reps, the issue of paying a double commission and the extra labor of manually inputting orders into CJ (in this merchants case) that would otherwise be automatically added. So there is alot of time and expense in putting a full blown solution together to track phone sales for a large merchant.
It CAN be done. But it takes a huge commitment from a merchant that typiclly must be convinced that this move will make them more money in the long run by proving they are more affiliate centerd than most and thereby attracting more strong partners.
Have gotten a lot of great feedback from my affiliate forum on this. So here is an update.
Merchant #1 is tracking phone sales.
Merchant #2 and 3 are in the works and should be active this week.
We are programming a variable header that will change for each affiliate.
After the 800 # (which is NOT that big anyway) We are going to use "Your Priority Code 123456" to entice the surfer to be sure to use the aff ID if they call in an order.
The priority code is the CJ PID.
After the P code there is a link that says "What's This?"
When some clicks this link a text window explains:
"Q - What is a Priority Code?
A - Many of our on-line prices are lower than you’ll find in our stores or in our catalog. If you phone-in your order, please be sure to provide your Priority Code to our Order Specialist. This is the only way to insure your eligibility for online pricing and any coupon codes you’d like to redeem."
I really encourage our affiliates to use our coupon codes to help increase conversions and also hope this will help surfers to remember to give the P code if they call.
On another note:
We also programmed an interactive search box which can help take the place of our free datafeeds for our affiliates who are not technical enough to make use of the feeds.
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